Comments by "Helium Road" (@RCAvhstape) on "Plainly Difficult" channel.

  1. Note to self: When coming across an area in a deep underground tunnel blocked by caution tape and smoke and flame clearly visible opposite the tape, DO NOT cross the tape and enter the confined area which is filling with smoke. Also, do not hang around the top end of an inclined tunnel with a smoldering grease fire in it, lest it suddenly turn into a giant flamethrower with me in its path.
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  2. "Lost most ships, the Sally had its fair share of screwups, including a couple of murders..." I hate when my ships have murders on them. You'd think they'd have designed that out by now.
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  3. I think the common element in all these disasters is that bloke with the clipboard and lab coat. If you see him near your project, keep an eye on the bugger.
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  4. A corrupt NYC official? Shocked, shocked I say.
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  5. Convict: "I murdered a guy and stole a million dollars. What are you in for?" Engineer: "I built a dam that didn't break like I was told to do. I'm really good at my job." Convict: Moves to get away from evil engineer.
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  6.  @koghs  You miss the point. When you go to a hospital you expect that they are taking care of you, that these systems have been thoroughly checked out. Plus, unlike Chernobyl or Fukushima where reactor buildings are exploding and alarms are going off, there's no sense of danger when one of these things kills you. You feel discomfort, then you get sick and die while the operator works another shift.
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  7. "Was considered safe due to all the writing being in Russian, which was a questionable safety feature". I dunno, whenever I find a machine hidden behind thick radiation shielding, I just assume it's safe if it looks like it came from Russia. I guess I'm doing it wrong?
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  8. That poor guy running along the platform definitely yelled, "Balls!"
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  9. Statistically, you are safer in a jetliner than on a ladder, I bet.
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  10. Reactors in caves may have problems, but it still seems like a better idea than how Chernobyl was built.
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  11. "Wow, that radiation alarm is annoying. Let me unplug it so I don't have to listen to it as I step into an area containing a radiation source." The company had a lot to answer for, as usual, but in this case it just seems like it mainly comes down to really poor judgement on the victim's part.
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  12. Yes, I remember commenting on that with my friends at the time. Christa's dad was smiling for a while because he didn't realize what he was witnessing yet. I thought that was pretty cruel of the news lizards to do that to her family.
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  13. Nothing like sleeping in on a Saturday morning and eating breakfast to a good nuclear accident video!
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  14. Context is important. You sell enough of these things to enough customers, some of who do not train or maintain properly, or operate with good judgement, you get accidents over a 50 year period.
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  15. I think this disaster is referenced in the film "Chinatown" with Jack Nicholson, when the engineer at the town hearing refuses to build another dangerous dam near the beginning of the film. It's a great crime noir story takes place with the backdrop of LA's shady water rights history, which involved screwing a lot of farmers and landowners out of their property,
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  16. Needs chrome tail lights and fins.
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  17. For air show disasters, the 1988 Ramstein accident deserves a video. And of course, for more aerospace ideas you've got Apollo 1, Apollo 13, Challenger, and Columbia, as well as a few Soviet accidents to cover if you are interested. Challenger in particular and NASA fatal accidents in general have lots of documentation to draw from.
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  18. Some people actually do their job, thankfully.
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  19. They probably saw what that photographer saw and decided to nope out.
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  20. It's not just British signals; I have yet to fully comprehend any signaling system. In the US it varies by railroad company and time period so you can really go down a rabbit hole with it.
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  21. In the 1990s there was a Discovery Channel special about one of these. Some lumberjacks spending the night in the frigid woods found some strange cans emitting heat, and decided to curl up next to the nice warm objects to sleep. Ooooops. Later on they showed up at a hospital with signs of radiation sickness. From their description the authorities guessed what this was and sent a crew up into the woods to secure the devices. There is video of these guys grabbing the cans with long metal tongs and tossing them onto the ice-covered road surface, which immediately sizzles into steam from the heat. A guy with a stopwatch calls "Time!" and the next guy goes up with the tongs and chucks the can into a big lead bucket on the back of the truck. They repeated this until all the cans were in the bucket, then posed for a big smiley-face photo. Nobody knows how many of these things are out there in the wilderness or where exactly.
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  22. When I was in high school they made us watch films about venereal diseases and had graphic photos of chancres and other sores on various body parts. Great stuff to look at, especially at lunchtime.
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  23.  @lumiauroras6741  Yes, risk is measured on two axes, likelihood of an accident vs. consequences. For a ladder, likelihood is high but consequences low, for modern jetliners it's the other way around. There's no way to make a crash at 500 mph survivable, so you have to reduce the likelihood to near zero. This has been largely achieved, but you have to stay on top of it to prevent stuff like MCAS.
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  24. You should do the Kosmos 954 accident if you haven't already. Soviet nuclear reactor-powered satellite that crashed into Canada in the 1970s.
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  25. Good to see PD getting back to its radiological roots. Seems like you've run short on these types of incidents, and that's a good thing for the general public I'd say. Also, I want a device that reads out "shitballs" when it goes off-scale high.
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  26. Given how many times you've used that Pinto-looking graphic in your videos, it's about time you've actually covered the legend itself! I am old enough to remember these cars being quite common, and like most 70s American "compact" cars I thought it was crap. Or, well, my dad did, anyway, and I was like 7 or 8 so I tended to agree with him. But I remember what they looked like up close, with cheap chrome and trim, a finish that was sure to rust through after a couple of winters' salted roads, and that awful exhaust smell. Some old cars, with no smog pumps or catalytic converters, smell cool, but in the 70s when they tried to clean up the exhaust they stank horribly. Nowadays cars hardly smell at all. When an antique hotrod drives by though, that smell suddenly transports me back to my childhood.
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  27. 8:46 they used a shielded Ford Pinto? That's a whole different hazard.
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  28. 23:56 Ah, now we see the problem. The Takata employees were probably using the strangely anatomically correct "crash test" dummies for something other than their intended purpose.
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  29. ​ @usernamesoldout And spending money rather than pocketing it.
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  30. In my experience the culture in management is to implement more rules, instead of disciplining the offenders who failed to follow the rules already in place. Especially if the industry you work in makes it difficult to fire worthless people due to fear of being sued.
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  31. Following WWII the US balked at giving the UK access to nuclear weapons tech, partly out of the usual national chauvinism, but also because the Brits had failed to properly screen the scientists they had sent to the Manhattan Project, which led to several of them being successful Soviet spies. Thus US UK relations took a downturn in this period, and to get better status in the "nuclear club" the UK pressed ahead quickly with Windscale. So it may be more correct to say that the US UK relationship was already suffering and this contributed to the background of the Windscale accident.
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  32. Slight correction: at 0:40 you say "northwestern Pennsylvania", when I think you meant northeastern. Northwestern Penna. is more about oil drilling history (look up Drake's Well) than coal. And then there is steel in various parts of the state as well as railroads... For a state that is mostly trees when seen from space, it sure has a huge industrial history.
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  33. Also bananas. Not kidding: "banana equivalent dose" or BOD is a measure of radiation, since all bananas are slightly radioactive. XKCD has a great graphic explaining this stuff.
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  34. Good info, thanks.
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  35.  @douglasskaalrud6865 Who hurt you?
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  36. Sheltered academic: "I have a brilliant idea: let's take a toy that was designed to be a punching bag for kids, and see if they punch it to prove...science...or something." Other scientists: "Brilliant!"
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  37. Heated roads for the winter, nice.
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  38.  @RT-qd8yl  The engineer from Thiokol who warned about the solid rocket booster cold weather issue before the Challenger accident. He was ignored, he was right, and he suffered for the rest of his life about it.
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  39. "Beat one of his animals to death" Well, there's a red flag right there.
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  40. When I was very little in the 1970s there was a tanker ship fire on the Delaware River near Philadelphia. The tanker Corinthos collided with the tanker Edgar M. Queeny and there was a huge explosion that shook my house, a couple miles away. I remember my dad watching the news on TV and there was footage of the ships burning. The deck of one of the ships was lifted and was draped over her side like a curtain. I found the Coast Guard report on it, but I can't find footage of it anywhere, and it's been so long that not many people even remember it now. It was pre-internet so it's almost forgotten. Plus that area of Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania has had quite a few refinery accidents and incidents over the years so it kind of gets lost in the noise I guess.
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  41. That's how things work in DC. Blame the innocent and cover for your guilty friends.
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  42. I find the concept of a "Plainly Difficult Universe" to be fascinating. The line between pop culture and reality becomes blurrier over time.
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  43.  @PerishingForLackOfKnowledge  Please explain how capitalism had anything to do with this. I'll get popcorn.
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  44. Me and some friends drove over that bridge a few months before this happened, and I've driven over the fixed version of it a few times since. The idea of driving off a downed bridge in pitch black darkness is a nightmare I've actually had more than once, one of those recurring dreams that makes you want to write a metal song about.
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  45. Laughs in Wuhan lab.
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  46. This is one of the most studied gunfights in US law enforcement history.
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  47. I'm an American but because of this channel I've caught myself using "balls!" as an expletive lately.
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  48. I have always hated crowds because of stuff like this, as well as what happens when riot police are around and things get kinetic. When I was a kid we used to horse around in the yard playing "Pileup", where we would pick out one of us and everyone jumps on top of him (as boys it takes us a while to grow a functioning brain lol). Having been at the bottom of that stack of people, unable to breath or even call for help, feeling the panic, was enough to teach me to avoid situations like the one in this video.
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  49. Manhattan Project used water cooling for its reactor (B Reactor). Also, there's nothing necessarily more dangerous about using air as coolant than water; the advantage is that you eliminate the risk of a loss of coolant accident. But you have to guard against fires both in the fuel elements and the reactor moderator, and you have to properly design the reactor so that the elements don't rupture, swell up and jam in the channels, or miss the water pool when discharged. Windscale was rushed to hurry up and build weapons for political and diplomatic purposes so these problems were not worked out. And later Chernobyl would show that even a water cooled graphite moderated reactor can still catch fire.
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  50. 7:01 Thanks to this channel training me, whenever I see someone standing like that with their hands on their knees I just assume they've taken a nasty radiation dose.
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